Whether and how firms can employ relative rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) to differentiate their brands from competitors in cyberspace remains a critical, puzzling issue in e-commerce research. By synthesizing relevant literature from cognitive psychology, marketing, and e-commerce, this study identifies key contextual factors that are conducive for creating brand positioning on...

The advent of sponsored search advertising raises many interesting questions regarding consumer's behavior, seller's advertising strategy, and the ensuing market dynamics. Online markets are characterized by significant information asymmetries and consumers rely on a number of informational cues or signals to infer the seller's quality. Of the various quality signals, advertising and price have...

Simplified Mechanisms with Applications to Sponsored Search and Package Auctions Paul Milgrom First draft: August 16, 2007 This draft: October 13, 2007 A simplified mechanism is a direct mechanism modified by restricting the set of reports or bids. An example is the auction used to place ads on Internet search pages, in which each advertiser bids a single price to determine the allocation of ei...

Motivated by the recently proposed (and eventually abandoned) partnership in sponsored search advertising between Yahoo! and Google, we examine a model for ad selection in which an agent must balance directly learning which ads perform best and outsourcing ad slots to another party in exchange for a share of any click revenue. Our framework captures a fundamental tension between the potential s...

In recent years, effective sponsored search auctions (SSAs) have been designed to incentivize advertisers (advs) to bid their truthful valuations and, at the same time, to assure both the advs and the auctioneer a non–negative utility. Nonetheless, when the click–through–rates (CTRs) of the advs are unknown to the auction, these mechanisms must be paired with a learning algorithm for the estima...

This paper compares the search engine marketing strategies adopted in China and the Western countries through two illustrative cases, namely, Google and Baidu. Marketers in the West use search engine optimization (SEO) to rank their sites higher for queries in Google. Baidu, however, offers paid search placement, or the selling of engine results for particular keywords to the higher bidders. Wh...

Sponsored search is a new application domain for the feature selection area of research. When a user searches for products or services using the Internet, most of the major search engines would return two sets of results: regular web pages and paid advertisements. An advertising company provides a set of keywords associated with an ad. If one of these keywords is present in a user’s query, the ...

Click-through rate is a quantity of interest to online advertisers, search engine optimizers, and sponsored search providers alike. The rate at which users click on advertisements presented to them serves as both a metric for evaluating advertising effectiveness and a financial tool for cost and revenue projection. To predict future click-through rate, investigators typically use historical cli...

This paper reports findings from a study investigating the effect of integrating sponsored and nonsponsored search engine links into a single web listing. The premise underlying this research is that web searchers are chiefly interested in relevant results. Given the reported negative bias that web searchers have concerning sponsored links, separate listings may be a disservice to web searchers...

Web spammers used Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to increase search-ranking of web sites. In this paper we have study the essentials SEO techniques, such as; directory submission, keyword generation and link exchanges. The impact of SEO techniques can be applied as marketing technique and to get top listing in major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Our study focuses on t...